Seagrass, coral, and many other blocks disappear at a very short distance when the player is in water

Cleaning up old tickets: This ticket has not been updated recently (~1 year+) so is being closed as Cannot Reproduce. If you feel this is still a valid issue then please comment, or create a new ticket following the Issue Guidelines.

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Reopened, confirmed, updated, added screenshots. The grass is visible above water, it only becomes invisible below

I experience the same issue on Windows 10, 1.16.201

This bug affects all blocks that use partially transparent textures and apply the transparency to part of their collision box. They stop rendering when the chunk they are in is >32 blocks from the player and the player is underwater. This also applies to custom blocks that use “render_method”: “alpha_test”, and that may indeed be the underlying trigger.

When the player is not in water these same blocks stop rendering at 1/2 of the player’s render distance setting. See MCPE-124841 for a full list of affected blocks.

Affected waterloggable blocks are shown in this image:

Note: cactus and kelp do not become invisible at the threshold distance; instead, they replace the transparent portion of their texture with a solid color.

Since the underwater fog was fixed in 1.17.10 and the farthest any vanilla fog is supposed to let you see is 60 blocks (based on the fog jsons in the vanilla resource pack), a large part of the rendering optimization granted by this behavior could be preserved while also fixing the reported issue just by setting the threshold distance to 4 chunks instead of 2. It doesn't need to scale with render distance underwater.

Can confirm for 1.18.2.

A more comprehensive view of this issue.